Alabama has clarified its voting rights policy in response to a report by AL.com.

Secretary of State John Merrill said via email Thursday that a class of felons featured in a Wednesday AL.com story are in fact eligible to register to vote, despite the fact that a number of them said they had recently applied for and been denied that right.

Felons like Randi Lynn Williams are in fact eligible to immediately regain their voting rights, according to Merrill. Williams, a 38-year-old Dothan woman who was convicted of fraudulent use of a credit card in 2011, would not have lost the right to vote under a new state law that went into effect in August.

"The voter would be eligible to register to vote and would be allowed to do so regardless of whether they have come to the end of their assigned incarceration period," Merrill wrote in a Thursday email. "The voter would not be required to pay fines, fees, or restitution to register to vote."

A Wednesday report co-published by AL.com and The Guardian exposed that felons across Alabama who had completed their terms of incarceration and supervision were being denied the right to vote solely because they had not paid off any outstanding fines, fees and restitution - debts known as legal financial obligations.

Merrill's Thursday statement appears to run counter to one he made to AL.com via telephone last month, though he maintains that it does not.

"In order for you to have your voting rights restored, you have to make sure all your fines and restitution have been paid," Merrill said last month in response to a question about the situation faced by the felons, as AL.com reported Wednesday.

Merrill said Thursday that the state's "standard has not changed."

The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit advocacy group, has reported that there are 286,266 disenfranchised felons in Alabama, or 7.62 percent of the state's voting-age population.

A study published in June in the Journal of Legal Studies looked at 1,000 Alabama felons who had completed any prison terms and periods of supervision to which they had been sentenced. The study found that about three-quarters of them still owed legal financial obligations.

Voting rights groups across the state told AL.com over the past month that numerous felons they work with had been told they could not vote until they paid off their legal financial obligations.

Prior to August, such felons had been barred from registering to vote because the boards of registrars in the counties where they committed their felonies had deemed that they had committed crimes "of moral turpitude," a term that was for decades left vague and interpreted in widely different ways by individual counties. Those convicted of crimes of moral turpitude in Alabama automatically lose the right to vote.

In August, the Definition of Moral Turpitude Act, a law signed in May by Gov. Kay Ivey, went into effect. It listed several dozen major felonies that are to be considered "of moral turpitude," such as burglary and drug trafficking.

Any crime not on that list was to no longer be considered of moral turpitude, and therefore no longer result in loss of the franchise. Examples of felonies that were sometimes considered of moral turpitude by individual county boards of registrars but are not identified as such in the new law include marijuana possession and third-degree theft.

But felons who were convicted before August of crimes no longer considered of moral turpitude under the new law were still being told in recent weeks that they would have to pay off their legal financial obligations before regaining the franchise, according to advocacy groups across the state.

Three Alabama organizations told AL.com last month that they have worked with multiple such felons who are still being blocked from registering to vote.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill. (Lawrence Specker/LSpecker@AL.com)

Pastor Kenny Glasgow, founder of the Dothan advocacy group The Ordinary People Society, has been working for years to clear the way for Alabama felons to vote. A formerly incarcerated person himself, he won a lawsuit in 2008 that cleared the way for felons who had only committed any of five specific felony charges to vote.

Glasgow said in a telephone interview Friday that his organization worked with multiple people who had not been convicted of crimes considered moral turpitude under the new law, but had been blocked from voting over the past two months due to outstanding legal financial obligations.

He said that he is "very glad that the state has cleared this up" and clarified its stance on the issue.

"To hear that the state has finally cleared it up and said that all these people who have the right to vote who don't even know it are eligible to vote - I thank the state and I thank John Merrill for clearing all that up," Glasgow said.

"I feel like Dr. Martin Luther King winning voting rights for the second time in Alabama all over again."

Tari Williams, organizing director at Greater Birmingham Ministries, said last month that she has worked with "a number of people" who have been convicted only of crimes that the new law does not list as being of "moral turpitude," yet who have recently been denied the opportunity to register to vote because they have yet to pay off all their legal financial obligations.

"They are saying your rights shouldn't have been taken in the first place, but now in order to get your right to vote back you first have to pay your fees and fines off," she said, as AL.com reported Wednesday.

"That's not fair at all because the person shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place."

Merrill said in a Thursday email that his office has been clear and consistent on the issue.

"If the crime they committed is no longer defined as a Crime of Moral Turpitude then they have not lost the right to vote and are eligible to vote as long as they meet all other standards and requirements to be an eligible voter," he said in the email. "If they are not currently registered, they must complete an application and then they will be confirmed as an eligible and qualified voter."

Merrill said in another email Thursday that his office had gotten the word about the impacts of the law out to the public by making "presentations at numerous community events around the state," and working to ensure inmates know "their voting rights status upon release from incarceration."

Merrill also said that the department has been in communication with boards of registrars across the state to ensure that they understand the new law.

"All of this information was shared with the Registrars in each county and since there was no clearly defined standard for Moral Turpitude, we encouraged them to use this standard after the Governor signed the legislation but even prior to it taking effect," he said via email.

Glasgow said that registrars in some counties have not been following Merrill's guidance.

"What happened was some of the boards of registrars were confused about who can vote and who cannot vote and they were telling people that they could not vote because of their financial obligations," Glasgow said.